During the ICANN meeting, which was held in Brussels this week, a decision was made yesterday regarding the .xxx extension. ICANN has agreed with the use of this domain. Up until now, there always was sufficient resistance against the release of this extension. An application was already filed 3 times, the application was always turned down.
ICM Registry will be responsible for the registrations of the .xxx domain names. ICANN now still needs to check if ICM will be able to do so technically and financially. If appears so, the domain can be available within 6 months. The extension is mainly wanted by people in the porn industry. Already 110.000 have been reserved. ICM itself counts on a million registrations. According to statistics of MBA Online there are approximately 25 million porn sites online.
Of course, erotic sites won’t be obligated to use the .xxx extension. The porn industry feared some time that this would happen and that all existing sites would be forced to use the .xxx domain.